This is the first guest posting on the blog, and I’ve changed some of my personal guidelines to accommodate it, including that it is longer than the usual posting,  The content is in response to a Reader’s Digest article by Karen Iversen, author of “Full Body Burden,” which is a book that contains an accumulation of negative stories about the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant (see the posting dated July 11). I have added a link to Ms Iversen’s book and my book “An Insider’s View of Rocky Flats” for those who want two different stories about the plant. With that introduction, the following is the submittal from Ken Calkins, a long time employee of the Rocky Flats Plant.

The July/August 2012 issue of Reader’s Digest carried an article – “My Nuclear Neighborhood” – by Karen Iversen, which supposedly told “what was really going on within those walls.”  It is difficult to understand just what the point of the article was, except that it was supposedly authentic because the author had lived in the area, and had actually worked in the plant – for one year, five years after the plant had ceased operations.

I would like to present another viewpoint, also as a neighbor, a few miles farther away than Ms. Iversen. I was an employee at the plant for 34 years (1955-1989).

With all the things that we have to worry about in our society: unemployment rates exceeding 8% for five years, a burgeoning national debt, periodic mass shootings, wildfires causing hundred millions of dollars in damage, traffic accidents causing thousands of deaths each year, etc., it is hard to understand why anyone would use any of their worry quota on Rocky Flats.  The fact is that, in the fifty plus years of Rocky Flats’ existence, nobody offsite (and not many onsite) was shown to be injured by Rocky Flats operations.  Yes, there are the stories about “my cousin, who lived five miles downwind from Rocky Flats, developed colon cancer, so it must have come from Rocky Flats.”  But the cousin probably had a brother-in-law who was a smoker, or had sprayed his lawn with a weed killer, or had used a mosquito spray on his patio, all of which are as likely to have been causative factors.  And colon cancer occurs thousands of miles away from Rocky Flats every year.  I repeat; no one has shown that they were injured, or that any property damage occurred, from Rocky Flats.

Probably a lot of the concern about Rocky Flats has its roots in what the news media likes to call the “super secret” or “top-secret” facility.  Actually, Rocky Flats followed the same security classifications for the same activities as any other facility within the AEC/DOE system.  These requirements were a matter of law, as mandated by Congress in the Atomic Energy Act of 1956, and were applied in order to prevent countries that didn‘t like us from easily building their own weapons. Violating the law could result in severe punishment, including prison terms.  No Rocky Flats employee was ever charged with a security breach.  So instead of implying that Rocky Flats personnel used the secrecy to cover up activities, anyone with concerns should talk to their Congressman about changing the law.  Actually, it would have been fine with most Rocky Flats employees if the facility had been opened up.  Perhaps the plant should have begun public tours earlier.

Another cause of the public concern about the Flats is the fiction, again perpetuated by the news media that “the tiniest particle of plutonium will kill you” and this combined with the fact that instruments have been developed to detect minute quantities of plutonium.  If the phrase “…within 200 years” were added, it might be closer to accurate.  Even then, some understanding is needed.  Like many other chemicals, small amounts of plutonium can be tolerated by the human body with no significant ill effects, but above a certain amount, biological damage begins to occur.  This threshold amount is called a “full body burden.”  The amount in one’s body is usually expressed as a percentage of the full body burden,  Besides plutonium, body burdens have been established for such chemicals as lead, mercury, arsenic, dioxins, DDT, PCBs, etc. Many ex-workers in the plutonium industry have carried significant body burdens of plutonium, some even exceeding 100%, for decades with no problems. So the idea that a member of the public would be immediately harmed from dust blowing from the plant is just not realistic.

Another fiction perpetuated by the news media is that the 1969 fire in Building 776 was the “costliest industrial fire in history.”  This idea came about because AEC officials chose to submit all fire related costs, including upgrades and improvements (even including the construction of Building 371) in one package.  From the standpoint of requesting money from Congress, this approach was probably best.  But it was like crashing your 1977 VW, worth $2000, into a tree, then telling your insurance agent that you have decided to replace it with a new Ferrari, so you are submitting a claim for $100,000.  He would tell you that the loss in the accident was the value of the VW, plus any death, injuries, and cleanup cost.  On that basis, the Building 776 fire was quite significant, but far from the costliest in history.

The so-called FBI “raid” in 1989, also referenced by Ms. Iversen and frequently referenced in the media, was so absurd that many technical employees were frustrated that corporate Rockwell did not aggressively show the public how silly it was.  An underlying cause was the dispute between two government agencies about who was in charge.  That was stimulated by the EPA’s inability to understand that the incinerator in question was a part of the plutonium recovery process, and not used for the disposal of wastes.  (A waste incinerator was operated elsewhere on the plant site.)  According to rumor, these points were fanned by some disgruntled employee’s report that the incinerator was being operated illegally.

Reportedly, the raid was conducted because the EPA found that the incinerator was being operated”at midnight” as determined by a helicopter flyover, using an infrared detector.  The implication is that anything operated at midnight is done so as to avoid detection by neighbors, and is therefore suspicious.  Now here is an operation being conducted inside a glove box, that inside a processing area with no windows, surrounded by “cold” service and hallways, inside a building with minimum 12″ thick concrete walls, inside a double-fence security area, inside a plant operations area, with the closest off-site neighbor about two miles away.  Why would operations personnel be concerned about whether or not the operation was seen?  And of course it was operating at midnight – also at any other time of the day or night.  The incinerator was a part of the plutonium recovery operation which was itself a continuous operation, starting up on Monday morning and closing down on Friday night.  Because it took about four hours to startup, and also four hours to conduct a safe shutdown, it was not feasible to operate in the daytime only.  So “operating at midnight” has no meaning at all.

Outsiders envision the “incinerator” as a large piece of equipment with a roaring fire inside.  Actually, it was small – about the size of your backyard barbecue – and was slowly fed small amounts of combustible material contaminated with plutonium.  Infrared detectors – and certainly the ones available in 1989 – cannot detect changes of a few degrees in air temperature.  But the incinerator in question produced little heat of combustion, and the exhaust gases were then cooled to nearly room temperature by a water scrubber before going to the building exhaust system.  The net effect on exhaust gas temperature was less than a degree, and was less than other process equipment such as the hydrofluorinator, calciner, and reduction furnaces.  The net effect of this technical jargon is that surveying the exhaust stack with infrared detectors tells nothing at all about operation of the incinerator, day or night, and so there was no basis for a “raid.”

The most ridiculous charge of all is that the incinerator was used to dispose of “unwanted” plutonium.  First of all – there is no such thing.  It is a highly valuable and sought-after material.  From a criticality safety point of view, the incinerator was not designed or permitted to operate with metallic or highly concentrated plutonium feed.  And the incinerator did not dispose of plutonium.  It simply burned off excess material and converted plutonium to plutonium oxide.  If the original feed was unwanted, then the resulting oxide was still unwanted, and had to be handled in some safe way.

Ms. Iverson is reported to have “devoted a decade to researching Rocky Flats”, whatever that means.  If so, I am surprised that she did not report that in the late 1950’s and -60’s, Rocky Flats was consistently recognized as the safest plant operation in Colorado, and among the top in the nation.  During this period, particularly starting after the 1957 fire in Building 71, all plant activities were carefully examined for safety aspects.  The plant was divided into Safety “Teams” and each team developed safety programs and goals.  Upon reaching the goals, team members were given some appropriate reward.  Rewards were also given for overall plant achievements.  At the top, the plant fell just short of reaching 25 million man-hours of work without a lost-time injury – a new national record.  The National Safety Council (NSC), which was the agency monitoring all industrial safety at that time, used measuring sticks involving fatalities, lost-time injuries, and near misses compared to man-hours of work. Using these criteria, Rocky Flats broke numerous national records for safe operation, and was always among the national leaders -not just within the AEC complex, but in all of industry.  A “culture of safety” was established at Rocky Flats before DOE ever thought of the term.  In 1970, the Operational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) was created within the Department of Labor, effectively taking NSC out of the picture.  OSHA used different measuring sticks and reporting systems, so it was hard to compare the Rocky Flats performance after that time.

One of the hardest things to understand is why the public, encouraged by news media, seems to feel that Rocky Flats employees were either stupid or suicidal.  The reasoning goes like this:  if some hazardous incident should occur, the individuals at greatest risk are those involved in the immediate operation; the next risk, reduced by a factor of ten or more, is to those in the same building; and then individuals on the remainder of the plant site are at risk, reduced by another factor of ten; and finally, the risk to the general public, miles away, is reduced by a another large factor.  So that means that if there is indeed any significant risk to the public from an operation, the risk to the individuals conducting the operation must be a thousand times or so higher.  To accept any significant risk, especially in view of the culture of safety discussed above, a person would have to be either stupid enough to not see the risks, or suicidal so that he ignores the risk.  I knew a lot of very intelligent people at Rocky Flats: PhDs in Chemistry, Nuclear Physics, Metallurgy, etc., MBAs and other college degrees.  I knew a lot of other average Americans; pipe fitters, carpenters, machinists, electricians, secretaries, clerks, guards, and so on.  I knew people I did not always agree with, and some I did not even like, but I never met anyone that I thought was stupid enough to perform a job that he thought was unsafe.  They would not have been hired.  Similarly, I never met anyone that I thought was suicidal.  So I would have thought that if the public understood that Rocky Flats operations were being conducted by competent people who understood their jobs and recognized any hazards but were still willing to proceed, the risk to the public was insignificant.

In a similar vein, I never knew anyone at Rocky Flats who lived like a hermit in a cave in the mountains.  Instead, off the plant site, we were all members of the general public, living, for the most part in typical neighborhoods in the Denver metro area.  We went to the mall, attended church, took our kids to little league games, rooted for the Broncos, just like everyone else.  It is just not reasonable to suggest that we would expose our neighbors, our friends, our families to any significant hazard from our professional activities.

I have touched upon just a few of the points that seem to be at the heart of the general public’s feelings about Rocky Flats.  The greater subject is so extensive and complex that it is impossible to cover in much less than an encyclopedia.  I would summarize my feelings by saying that I feel very strongly that the facility was well managed and well operated, and played a very important role in protecting our national security.  Some incidents occurred which were unfortunate, but at no time in those incidents was there any significant threat to lives or property in the Denver area.  There was never a “radioactive cloud sent over Denver” or “close to a nuclear catastrophe” as quoted by some imaginative writers.  But there were some great technical accomplishments achieved there, in areas assigned by the AEC/DOE.  I am proud of my career there, and do not feel a need to apologize to anyone for it.

This book by Kristen Iversen is a nearly encyclopedic collection of negative stories and rumors about the Rocky Flats nuclear weapon plant and there is a companion review of the book on that link of this web site. The author did a significant amount of research and numerous interviews, but there are indications that some of the information was misinterpreted, misunderstood, or exaggerated.

The author emphasizes that the neighbors believed the Rocky Flats plant made cleaning supplies despite the fact the one headline mentioned in the book celebrating that the plant would be built near Denver referred to the Atomic Energy Commission plans to build an “A-plant.” The theme that no one knew what was going on at Rocky Flats is continued through the author’s childhood despite documentation in the book about several scientists doing sampling and analysis that identified plutonium downwind of the plant after the 1969 fire. Plutonium contamination from the plant had been well-documented and advertised by people who opposed the plant and its mission when Colorado voters considered a constitutional amendment to outlaw production of nuclear weapons components at Rocky Flats in November 1982. Voters decided they wanted the jobs and resulting positive economic impact on the metro area despite the news reports about contamination from the plant. Slightly under a two thirds majority voted against the amendment and in favor of retaining the plant. That vote isn’t mentioned in the book.

I’ve decided I only have enough space for a few of the subjects where I disagree. Where should I start? The descriptions of the 1957 fire in Building 771 and the plutonium contamination from the 903 pad are somewhat similar to factual accounts, although the statement that the 1957 fire might have released “…as much as 92 pounds of plutonium or more…” is clearly an exaggeration. The account of the 1969 fire begins by saying it was in Building 771 and then describes black smoke coming out of the stack of Building 776/777. The only stack visile off site was the one at 771. Also, I saw the plenums after the fire, and could not even see the damage that was reported to the first stage. The other three stages of filtration were undamaged, which means “black smoke” wouldn’t have been coming out of any stack or vent. The orange and white hazmat suits the author mentions weren’t used until decades after the 1969 fire.

The litany of accusations about accidents is less important than the many accusations about health effects of Rocky Flats.  I’ll restrict myself to a few key points. There are discussions about tons of plutonium missing from Rocky Flats, and it is ignored that those “tons” are later accounted for at waste disposal sites. Just about every governmental agency and several private groups have done sampling and analysis of soil samples in the vicinity of the plant, and releases in the tons of plutonium would be quite easy to detect. A ton of weapons grade plutonium contains over 60,000 curies of activity. Add twelve zeros to that number and you arrive at the picocurie unit of measure used for amounts of plutonium in soil.

There are mentions of autopsy samples from people around Rocky Flats that found plutonium contamination. There is also a mention  that plutonium was recently detected in the crawl space of a home near Rocky Flats. There isn’t a person in the world who does not have plutonium contamination and there isn’t a location in the world where you won’t find plutonium  It will be found in any crawl space in any city and in the tissue of any resident in the world.

There is mention of a rancher who had a deformed pig he took to meetings and that thorium was found in the gonads of some of his animals. There are higher levels of background thorium in Colorado than most locations, but they were there before the Rocky Flats plant was constructed. Rocky Flats did not process thorium.

The author thought she had caught the plant in a lie when she wrote, “Despite insistence there has never been a criticality…a memo reports an average of two ‘nuclear criticality infractions’ each month.” “Criticality infraction” was the term used when the aggressive program to prevent criticalities found something in a glovebox that wasn’t mentioned in the strict criticality limits required to be posted on the box. A criticality infraction was certainly not the same as a criticality, although I can understand why that would be confusing. On the subject of criticalities, it is mentioned that during a fire in Building 371, “The criticality alarm blares…indicating there is plutonium contamination in the air.” The alarm that sound when there is airborne plutonium contamination is called the Selective Alpha Air Alarm (SAAM) and not a criticality alarm.

There are other passages in the book that bothered me because of inaccuracy or misinterpretation, but what is important is that the author suspects illnesses of herself, her family, friends, and neighbors were caused by Rocky Flats. One study by Colorado concluded that laborers were and are the most at risk from plutonium released from Rocky Flats, and that risk “…is about the same as a person’s risk from plutonium released during past nuclear weapons testing.” That risk is listed 0.5 in a million. The risk of being killed by a lightning strike is given as 110 in a million. It is estimated that 46 percent of people living in Colorado will develop cancer in their lifetime. So there will be 460,000 out of a million Coloradoans who develop cancer in their lifetimes. It would seem we could find something other than one chance in a million to worry about. I liked Vincent Carroll’s explanation in his opinion column about “Full Body Burden” titled, “Again, raising a false alarm.” The first sentence is, “We never want to stop scaring one another, do we?”

The book mentions that an appeals court reversed the class action lawsuit verdict that had awarded hundreds of millions to land and home owners around Rocky Flats. There is no explanation for the why the court took that action. The court ruled that irrational fear cannot be grounds for a judgment. To the extent Plaintiffs rely on anxiety from an increased risk to their health as an interference with the use and enjoyment of their properties, that anxiety must arise from scientifically verifiable evidence regarding the risk and cannot be wholly irrational.”

Since irrational fear is just as debilitating as rational fear, it is my hope that people who have become fearful because of what they read in Ms. Iversen’s book will read my free book about Rocky Flats. Perhaps Chapter 25 will help some people be less fearful. The table of contents lets you go directly to specific chapters. The book is also available for purchase on Amazon as Kindle or paperback for those who prefer to pay for books. The subtitle of my book “An Insider’s View of Rocky Flats” is “Urban Myths Debunked.” I suggest the subtitle for “Full Body Burden” could have been “Urban Myths Perpetuated.”

News of the Supreme Court action about the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant was nearly hidden in a week of momentous rulings on health care and an Arizona law.  The story begins in 1990 when a lawsuit was filed by landowners downwind of the plant following the FBI/EPA raid alleging environmental crimes. The jury in the original trial reached a verdict for the plaintiffs “…because of damages from plutonium contamination.” The decision was possible because one juror who wanted to rule for the defendants was removed by the judge after leaving the jury room to beg for someone to intercede and end harassment by jury members who wanted to find for the plaintiffs.

The announcement of the verdict made the headlines on the front page of the Denver Post in February 2006. Another front page story was written when the Denver-based

U.S. Circuit of Appeals threw out the verdict and sent the case back for a new trial. The court ruled, in part, that the evidence presented by the plaintiffs did not, “…reveal evidence of an increased health risk…” Testimony indicated that the exposure created an “…unquantifiable increased risk of health problems.” The ruling mentioned that irrational fear was not justification for damages.

The Supreme Court refusal to reinstate the judgment and send the case back for a new trial attracted much less news coverage.  The entry about from the ruling in the June 26, 2012 “Colorado Roundup” section of the Denver Post consisted of a headline and four sentences.

Bloomberg had an article by Bob Drummond that gives significantly more space to explaining the history of the suit and the decision of the Supreme Court. I find it curious that the local news barely found space to mention the story.

I have just received a library copy of Kristen Iversen’s book “Full body Burden, Growing up in the shadow of Rocky Flats.” The front flap says the book is “…a detailed and shocking account of the government’s sustained attempt to conceal the effects of the toxic and radioactive waste released by Rocky Flats…” Whoever wrote that statement had to ignore the substantial evidence that concludes Rocky Flats did not harm nearby residents. So far the courts agree with that conclusion.

“An Insider’s View of Rocky Flats, Urban Myths Debunked” is a book that is free on line for anyone interested in what actually happened at and around the plant. The book is also available in paperback and Kindle.

The United Mine Workers Union was at the center of violent conflict with coal mining companies described in the book “Killing for Coal” by Thomas G. Andrews.  District 50 of that union was certified to be the sole bargaining agent for over 1700 workers at the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant in Colorado in 1964. The union merged with the United Steelworkers in 1972, and that organization represented the workers until the site was closed.

Many of the “bargaining unit” (union) people I worked with at Rocky Flats were in the area because grandparents or other relatives had immigrated to Colorado for jobs working in the coal mines in and around Lafayette and other nearby towns. “The Coal Mining Heritage of Lafayette,” says that that Lafayette was a “major coal town from the late 1880s to until the 1930s.” My coworkers in the Rocky Flats production areas occasionally told stories about how easy we had it and how safe our jobs were compared to what their Grandfathers and other older relatives described about working in the mines.

There was a strike that began a few months after I began working at the plant, and it did not go well for the union. Dow Chemical was managing the site for the Atomic Energy Commission, and they assigned salaried workers to perform the functions required to meet schedules. They also announced that the union had voided the contract, and any worker who crossed the picket lines would be given seniority. As I wrote in “An Insider’s View of Rocky Flats,” the union released reports to the news media that stating that salaried workers were ignoring safety rules and charged that Dow was “…letting radioactive pollution into our state.” The strike was eventually settled, but, in my opinion, conflict among the workers was much more frequent and the reputation of the plant was damaged.

News reports about the dangerous working conditions at Rocky Flats began to be published or aired with increasing frequency, and union officials soon learned the issue of safety gave them tremendous leverage. I always found that to be quite puzzling, since I had been impressed about the continual focus on safety of operations since my first days in the research and production areas after receiving my clearance. I didn’t notice that the new focus resulted in improvements in safety, but there were obvious changes in union-company relations. No manager dared rule that a complaint was baseless without the risk of seeing a headline, “Rocky Flats Management Ignores Safety.”

Of course people performing operations should always be listened to carefully when they suggest safety or efficiency or both can be improved. However, forgive me if I was sometimes skeptical that the purpose of the concern was always improvement. I was in the position of building superintendent when a safety concern shut down the movement of material from one floor to another on an elevator. The concern was that the elevator didn’t have an emergency light. I thought that was a good suggestion, and had a flashlight hung on the wall of the elevator. Another safety concern was filed that it might be difficult to find the flashlight if the lights went out. I had more flashlights placed in the elevator and the material was moved about a week after the project had been suspended while the issue was resolved.

I often thought of the contrast between what I and my coworkers were experiencing working in clean, cool rooms with gloveboxes protecting us from the hazardous materials, including plutonium, and the men of the coal mines breathing toxic dust and chemicals while fearing the next collapse of a wall that would crush them. Many of the miners who survived explosions had “coal tattoos” created by the blast force that drove small particles of coal into their skins. I can only guess what the older relatives who worked the Lafayette coal mines would have thought if they could have seen the contrast. I believe they would have been proud of the many union people I worked with who had a strong work ethic and who often made suggestions that made out work safer and more efficient.